All about life and living.

Month: November 2010

I met this lady today who teaches at a primary school in the Filmnagar area in Hyderabad. This is where my friend’s organisation, Kriti, is also working. It was good to connect with another volunteer and get her perspective on teaching primary school kids English , which motivated this post.

In my last 3 months of teaching kids of the third standard, I have come to believe that a combination of story-telling ( big-book methodology of the India Literacy Project), rhymes and reading, and Phonetics is probably the best way to go in order to help kids learn English ( and through it get introduced to a different world than what they know).

Starting next week I am going to try doing exactly this: since I spend two hours every week teaching, I will do one day of storytelling + rhymes, and one day of Phonetics. Or, better still, split up the hour. Half hour of fun and half hour of learning the sounds of letters and reading. ILP is already providing books so my aim of getting a decent book into each kids hands is happening.

This month I also plan to take a small check on how much the kids are learning. Will probably do the same test that we did in the beginning of the session.